Ami ShalevThere’s this guy you keep seeing around. He favors muscle shirts and cut-offs, even when it’s chilly out. When he walks, he has a way of putting his weight on the balls of his feet, like he’s looking for something to pounce on. Sometimes, when’s passing a shop window, he makes a sidelong glance at himself and flexes his triceps until he can see them ripple. And he talks up attractive women at every opportunity. One day, though, he sits down next to you on the bus and starts up a conversation without any obvious agenda. You’re surprised at how articulate he is and notice that his whole appearance changes the longer you talk. The bravado you used to silently indict from afar now seems like a layer of clothing he wears to cope with emotional weather. So when he asks for your phone number, you give it and make sure to get his in return. A week later you go by his place for the first time. He shows you to a seat on the couch and returns to what he’d been doing. “ My grandmother taught me to knit. It’s a great way to relax. Plus, I can make my friends gifts instead of buying them something in the store.” You sit back, a little dumbfounded. The television is tuned to an old movie. He senses your question. “Fellini, before he went surreal.”

Monotonix’s Body Language is that guy. At first, this hearty EP produced by the trio of guitarist Yonatan Gat, drummer Ran Shimoni and front man Ami Shalev seems like a sinewy testament to the virtues of in-your-face metal funk, an able reconstitution of the formula made wildly popular by bands like the Red Hot Chili Peppers when George the First was President. Bridging the difference between “sanguine” and “sanguinary,” the rhythm’s happy-minded aggression sets you throbbing. If you go through life lamenting the lack of hardness in your rock, this record will redress the dysfunction with brutal efficiency. What gives Body Language real staying power, though, is that it stays firm without becoming simplistic. The Yonatan Gatlonger you listen, the more its taut climaxes seem like a cover story diverting attention from feelings not bound to the beat.

While Monotonix hits its 1970s reference points square, from Black Sabbath to Funkadelic, the overall effect is not simple nostalgia so much as longing for the sort of reconciliation that usually requires the perspective afforded by distance. They don’t sound like a band that actually existed in that decade. Body Language urges listeners to acknowledge the past rather than relive it.. This is where the fact that the band is from Tel Aviv rather than New York or London looms largest. In some ways, Israelis relate to that decade just like their American and European counterparts. The promise of the 1960s gave way to disillusionment in Israel, too. From the horror of Munich to the Yom Kippur War, to the widening ideological divide between liberal and conservative Israelis confirmed by the Likud party's rise to power, the 1970s were not an era that inspired much optimism.

And the rock music of that period that served as its soundtrack, most of it imported from the United States and the United Kingdom, was imbued with an aura of resignation, expressing a desire for rebellion without devotion to a cause. Its hardness, in other words, tended towards cynicism. That’s why the moments when Body Language temporarily foregoes the masculinist party line are so significant. The title track is a perfect example. After starting with a riff straight out of Guitar Hero and vocalist Shalev sing-speaking his lines like a man whose face is frozen in a sneer, the song veers into a chorus that turns that cocksure pose inside out. Recontextualized against a mournful figure that sounds like something from a Euro-Pop number of the 1980s, the very antithesis of classic rock swagger, Shalev's voice metamorphoses into an instrument of introspective regret. To be sure, that transformation is balanced by the irony that he never relinquishes. But the music prevents his words from coming off as insincere.

Much has been made of how widely Body Language diverges from Monotonix’s live shows, already legendary for breaking down every barrier between audience and performer even though they are a relatively new act from a place typically regarded as a rock music backwater. While it’s true that the record sounds a lot more polished and “rockist” than their anarchic concerts, however, it produces similar effects. In a live setting, the band encourages listeners to dispense with convention and the distance that helps to maintain it. And that’s what they do on Body Language as well, the difference being that breaking their audience free of mental chains in that context requires a different approach. Either way, Monotonix lure you into their work, inspiring trepidation, only to invite you to sit down on the sofa and watch them knit for a while. In a culture where men have long been trained to root all traces of softness out of their personality, that’s a message with more ideological import than the shouting of political slogans.

Check out a recent show by the band on WFMU.

Congratulations! You’ve managed to get through the first 2.5 weekdays. To help you get through the second half of your week, Jewcy is happy to present you with Hump Day Art. Think of it as an opportunity to devote your attention to the more cultural things in life, or at the very least, to zone out at your desk for a few minutes while you look at some pretty pictures.

I've loved Maira Kalman ever since I first read her children's book, Max in Love, as a kid. A native of Tel Aviv, but thoroughly a New Yorker, Kalman incorporates color, fantasy, and humor into her art with a style that walks the line between sentimental and strange. Here are a few of my favorites from her year-long project with the Times (recently published as a book), The Principles of Uncertainty.

Last week: Peace Through Graffiti?

Congratulations! You’ve managed to get through the first 2.5 weekdays. To help you get through the second half of your week, Jewcy is happy to present you with Hump Day Art. Think of it as an opportunity to devote your attention to the more cultural things in life, or at the very least, to zone out at your desk for a few minutes while you look at some pretty pictures.

Iranian street artist A1one recently teamed up with Israeli artists Inspire and Poe to create a series of works called “Evolution of Violence” showcased on the walls of Tel Aviv and Tehran.

Inspire writes, “We were all born creators...we have no need for systems of control which ultimately help to cause senseless violence to evolve within our cultures...You don't have to fuck people over to survive…”

Here are images from both cities.

Tel Aviv

Tehran

Last week: Sand in the Holy Land

Wassup, B: is that tempura in your pocket, or are you just happy sashimi?More than happy to ignori (forgive me) the recurring warnings about mercury-laden fish, Israel has blossomed into a veritable sushi Eden. The 100th sushi restaurant opened its doors in Tel Aviv this past week, which makes the seaside city the "world's 3rd largest sushi market in per capita terms," behind only Tokyo and New York. According to Israeli restaurant review site 2EAT, approximately 20% of Tel Aviv's sushi spots are kosher, and "one out of every 10 Tel Avivians eats sushi at least once a month." The tourist version of 2EAT, which is in English, lets you see that Israeli sushi roll.

When the Japanese cuisine first appeared in Israel, many people thought it was "disgusting." Adventurous Israelis struggled with chopsticks, and some befuddled customers even requested that bread be served alongside the fish and rice: Imagine stuffing your tuna sushi into a pita pocket. In the past fifteen or so years, though, sushi has become a favorite ethnic cuisine in Israel. Not only that, but Israelis have begun to make their own mark on the cuisine, adding ingredients like mango, roast chicken, and even liver.

Something is fishy, though: The popular provisions might be threatened by a government mandate that would "expel all Asian employees at ethnic restaurants in order to make room for Israeli workers" by next January--a move that could potentially mean doom for a number of restaurants.

Have you had sushi in Israel? If so, tell us about it: sake to me in comments. (Surely you knew that was coming. I mean, really--I'm not just here for the halibut).

Tougher than your average British schoolboy: An Israeli soldierLet’s start with a confession. At my Jewish school in north London we did not much like the Israeli pupils. They wore dubonim (padded khaki army jackets) and sand-colored canvas boots. They strutted around and spoke to each other in loud Hebrew. They could drive—cars at least, and for all we knew, tanks. They appropriated without asking—as Israelis do—a space they liked the look of, a comfortable corner of the sixth-form common room. There they sat, or rather slouched, in their dubonim, with their canvas boots on the table.

Worst of all, the prettiest girls were fascinated by these tanned shtarkers. They sat in their laps. We suspected—knew—that these Israelis were actually doing it. So we fought back in the traditional Diaspora manner: with words. The cleverest boy in the school added a speech bubble to a poster of John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever (this was the late 1970s). It said: “I am a Palestinian”. This caused a satisfying fury.

Eventually, I too found a girlfriend, and my annoyance abated. And I began to wonder about these Israelis. Who were they? How could they be Jews, but so utterly different to us? I even became friendly with several. They were interesting. They said what they thought. They did not use the conditional, passive circumlocutions that shape British social intercourse. They had a certain piquancy, not just because they ate different foods. They were pushy and pre-emptive, I realized, because otherwise they, and their country, would not exist. I was going to university. The Israelis were headed for the army, and would eventually go to war.

It was, I decided, time to find out more myself. I took a year out and spent six months on Kibbutz Ramat Hashofet, just south of Haifa. We worked half the day and studied Hebrew the rest. Ramat Hashofet was a leftist kibbutz, the kind of place whose founders had dreamed that one day Stalin would visit. He would say, ‘Comrades, I admit I made some administrative errors, but you, you got it right.’

Socialist paradise: Kibbutz Ramat Hashofet Stalin never made it to Ramat Hashofet. But I was there. I had dreamed of making the desert bloom and bringing forth the fruits of the earth with my bare hands. I worked in a wood factory, making ammunition boxes. It was boring, dusty and messed up my contact lenses. Even so, I could see that every day a separate group of workers arrived to feed the wood into the machines. They did not live on the kibbutz. They spoke Arabic. They were day laborers from nearby villages. I asked why they could not join the kibbutz if they worked there. Because they are not Jewish, came the reply. This did not seem very socialist to me, but Zionist socialism has different rules to the everyday variety, the kibbutzniks explained.

It all seemed to just about make sense there on Ramat Hashofet, but back in Britain, at university I still wondered. I decided to study Arabic, including a summer course in the colloquial Palestinian dialect, at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. And now, looking back, I realize that it was in that classroom that my book City of Oranges, which recounts the lives of three Jewish and three Arabs families in Jaffa, was born.

One day a fellow student, an American immigrant in his early sixties, was recounting the beauties of his Arab house. He was a nice guy, liberal, intelligent—learning Arabic, after all. His house was built from Jerusalem stone, he said. It had a terrace, high ceilings to let the breeze flow through, was spacious and airy. But his enthusiasm was tempered by regret. For he knew that his lovely house of Jerusalem stone was haunted. Not by ghosts, but by its previous owners. And one day, someone might come and knock on the door.

Fast forward more than twenty years. I am standing at the door of a large stone villa on the southern end of Jaffa with Fadwa Hasna, and her niece, Rema Hammami. Now an elegant grandmother, Fadwa grew up in this house. Rema is a feisty woman in her early forties who teaches at Bir Zeit university near Ramallah. Both are Palestinians and live in East Jerusalem.

Like Florida, but with fewer Jews: Jaffa oranges The house was built by Fadwa’s father Ahmad Hammami in the 1930s. Ahmad was the scion of an old Jaffa family and worked in the fruit and vegetable business. Another branch of the Hammami family lived next door, and the two houses shared a lush garden, filled with fruit trees, from which Fadwa's mother, Nafise, would make jam. That house is gone and the garden is a rubble-strewn lot. The Hammami villa is now an Israeli home for the elderly, with bits added, chopped off and covered in concrete. Before 1948 this quarter was called Jebbaliyyeh and was home to Jaffa’s prospering Arab middle class. It has since been renamed Givat Aliyah, meaning “Hill of Aliyah,” and the only people prospering are the local drug dealers. Palestinians who worked with Israel in Gaza are also moved here, to be ostracized by their neighbors.

Fadwa remembers the fighting between Jaffa and neighboring Tel Aviv. It erupted in November 1947 immediately after the UN resolution to partition Palestine between Jews and Arabs. First school stopped, then her father Ahmad spent nights at the barricades. By spring 1948 the right-wing Irgun, led by Menachem Begin, was determined to capture the city. Taking Jaffa, the cultural capital of Palestine, would be useful political capital in the coming intra-Zionist struggle with Ben Gurion's labor Zionists. At the end of Pesach in April Begin ordered a ferocious mortar bombardment on Jaffa. The shells rained down and tens of thousands of fled in terror. The Hammamis took a taxi to the port and a boat to Lebanon. There the family dispersed. Fadwa later married Suleyman Hasna, a scion of an old East Jerusalem family and moved to Jerusalem, then part of Jordan.

After the Six Day War the borders between Israel and the West Bank were open. Fadwa was the first Hammami to return to the family home. She came with her mother Nafise. Nafise refused to get out of the taxi when they arrived, but Fadwa talked her way inside. It’s a difficult journey to make, but Fadwa keeps coming back. And each time her children have a new baby, after a while they bring the child here, to show the house that their great-grandfather Ahmad Hammami built.

Room with a view: A minaret in Jaffa The old people's home manager is quite fed up with Fadwa. “You come and you come," he asks. "When will you stop?" Never, she replies.

Sometimes he does not want to let her in. But I remember enough Hebrew from my ulpan. “Shalom,” I say as we walk inside. “I am a British journalist. Can we see the house?”

So we go in, and Fadwa gives me a guided tour. An institutional smell pervades the place, and many of the residents are clearly in their last days. Cheap aluminium walls and partitions divide the house. But the architecture is still gracious, and I marvel at the windows, the thick stone walls, the spacious lay-out, with a large space for family meals, and the bedrooms off to the side. Fadwa shows me the family kitchen, her old room, where she used to play with her brothers and sisters. The old people watch us bemusedly as we wander around.

Had Ahmad Hammami stayed, and sat out the mortar bombardment in his cellar with his family, Fadwa might still be living there. The mortars stopped after three days when Britain, still the mandatory power, threatened to bomb Tel Aviv. But Ahmad, fearful for his family, could not have known that. Once the British left in mid-May, the new Israeli army did not have to fight their way into Jaffa. Its soldiers walked into an abandoned city. Just three or four thousand stayed: over ninety thousand had fled. “I couldn’t understand,” wrote David Ben-Gurion in his diary. “Why did the inhabitants leave?” Perhaps he should have asked Menachem Begin.

I learned a lot that day with Fadwa and Rema. About the human cost of exile and disposession, of the 1948 Israeli war of independence, which the Palestinians call Al-Nakba, the catastrophe. About the nervousness too, that underpins modern Israeli society. The fear that one day, someone will knock on the door, with a legal—or worse, a moral—claim. Perhaps that’s why Israelis, even in my school common room, feel they must mark out their territory.

Will Fadwa ever get her house back? Probably not. But never say never. Perhaps in the distant future, Israel and her neighbors will eventually make peace. The Palestinians and the Jews will all be compensated, or have their properties returned. It’s a comforting, if unlikely vision. Maybe Rema or Fadwa’s children will day settle here, with their families. For isn’t that what everybody really wants, Israeli or Palestinian, just to go home?

WE GET LAID BECAUSE OF ‘MUNICH’

THE NEWS:
“Knocked Up” gives off-handed discussion of Jewish power. [The Jewish Telegraph Agency]

THE CHATTER:
“This film is every man’s wet dream.” (i.e. the fat dude with the Jewfro gets in Katherine Heigl’s pants.) [Rotten Tomatoes]
Director Judd Apatow of "40-Year-Old Virgin" and "Freaks and Geeks" won’t settle for just a superficial laugher. [Rolling Stone]
Eric Bana kicked ass as Mossad agent in "Munich," but too bad Spielberg butchered history and Tony Kushner made up Golda Meir quotes. [National Review Online]

 

OK, WE ALSO GET LAID BECAUSE OF ZIONISM

THE NEWS:
This year, some 300 Jewish New Yorkers, most in their 30’s, are making aliya to Israel. Wanna guess how many are single and lonely? [NYC Jewish News]

THE CHATTER:
Birthright perversions can wait – they may be sharing their new neighborhoods with Sudanese refugees. [Power Line Blog]
Don’t worry about finding work in Tel Aviv, you can just go shopping and they’ll pay you. [expatriates.com]

 

NAZISM, COMMUNISM, BABS

THE NEWS:
Streisand settles for less than a mil, plays first ever concert in Germany. [The Jewish Telegraph Agency]

THE CHATTER:
Rumor had it that Babs wouldn’t play in Germany because of the Holocaust. [Reuters]
Forget WWII, the singer said she hated her birthplace, Brooklyn. Now that’s unholy. [Ticket4-You.com]

JEWS IN THE HOOD

THE NEWS:
Infamous Jewish blogger, “Bagel in Harlem,” leaves the ghetto, and she hasn’t been heard from since January. [Big Shirtless Rob]

THE CHATTER:
One woman’s love affair with a storied NYC neighborhood. That is, until some homeless dude whacked her over the head with a bag of cans. [Bagel in Harlem]
Where Jews go, Asian cuisine follows: new sushi spot in Harlem. [Harlem Fur]

 

PENISES TO THE LEFT, VAGINAS TO THE RIGHT

THE NEWS:
Jewish independent school in Sweden segregates the sexes. [SperoNews]

THE CHATTER:
But what if same-sex learning makes them better at chess? [The Federation of Jewish Communities]
If the men and women don’t mix, and they wear black polyester in the winter, are Hasids really all that different from the denizens of ummah? [Gates of Vienna]

 

THIS IS WHY ISAIAH BERLIN DIED A VIRGIN

THE NEWS:
The perfect posh kosher wedding for only £100 per minute. [The Jewish Chronicle]

THE CHATTER:
Please, don’t get the M&M’s with his and her names. Actually, don’t even get married in the UK. You could have your fairytale wedding in Texas for the subscription price of London Weddings magazine. Plus in Texas you smash a beer can instead of a champagne glass. [London Weddings]
Ladies, don’t forget the modestly high neckline and long sleeves. [WeddingGuideUK.com]

 

MORE BOYCOTT BOLLOCKS

THE NEWS:
Eric McDonald, the Transport and General Workers Union’s Birmingham branch secretary, who encourages boycott of Israeli goods, says, “Israel is very intolerant and sometimes its behavior is not dissimilar to that of the Nazis.” [The Jewish Chronicle]

THE CHATTER:
TGWU writes letter to Blair regarding last summer’s war in Lebanon. [T&G]
Is it hypocritical if the lads down at TGWU love falafel?

 

5,000 YEARS OF HOT LOVIN’

THE NEWS:
Jews are great in bed because of guilt. [thisisby.us]

THE CHATTER:
If only the hole in the sheet business were true... [Judaism 101]
You might as well get that bullseye tattoo on your lower back since Jewish cemeteries still debate the penalty for body desecration. [The Boston Globe]

On Friday night a friend of mine brought over an article from the Jerusalem Post about the Secular Yeshiva, a new organization in Tel Aviv devoted to giving non-observant Israeli Jews a stronger understanding of Jewish texts. Here’s a little snippet from the article:

Like in any yeshiva, students pore over the Gemara, the Torah, the Shulhan Aruch and Maimonides from morning until evening. But unlike other yeshivot, there is no prayer service, no kosher kitchen and no separation between the sexes. There is a period in the morning called shaharit, but rather than pray, the students meditate or read poetry.

Study at the Secular Yeshiva: and no one will shove anything down your throat. Yay!

At its head is not an old, bearded rabbi, but Tal Shaked, a fair-skinned woman with long blonde hair, who prefers not to be called rosh yeshiva but rather the yeshiva's director.

"One of the main ideas of the yeshiva is that there is no one person in charge," says Shaked, a former lawyer with the Jerusalem District Attorney's Office. "There's no one authority, the idea is to expose them to many worldviews."

So along with the classic Jewish texts, the students also study Ahad Ha'am, A.D. Gordon and Haim Nahman Bialik with the same fervency.

"We don't see any text as an authority but as an inspiration," explains Eran Baruch, one of the founders of the Secular Yeshiva and head of the Bina Center for Jewish Identity and Hebrew Culture, through which the yeshiva is administered. "We treat Ahad Ha'am and Gemara the same way - no text is holier than the other."

The intention here in the converted Kupat Holim building in South Tel Aviv is not to study and become more religious, but to learn about Jewish culture, says Shaked. "You can be a Jew without doing mitzvot."

Perhaps, but doing mitzvot is half the program at the Secular Yeshiva, where some 150 pre- and post-army men and women spend a year studying two or three days a week and volunteering in the surrounding impoverished neighborhoods the rest of the time. There's even a program for students from abroad to spend one day a week learning in the yeshiva and the remainder of the week in community service.

Is this the best thing since sliced bread, or what? Finally, a program that’s not trying to brainwash anyone, that doesn’t have an agenda beyond the respect and understanding of Judaism and Zionist history. Too often in Israel secular society ignores Jewish history entirely. I think this kind of place, an organization that isn’t doing kiruv, that isn’t trying to trick people into becoming more religious, is an amazing antidote to the distance so many Israelis feel between themselves and their heritage. Learning about your roots doesn’t mean you have wear a long skirt and daven micha, it just means you have a deeper understanding of yourself and your country. So cool! I can’t wait to visit when I’m next in Israel. In the meantime, check out their website.

A new restaurant chain is seeing its way to Israel and one that businessman Ofer Ahiraz feels will "suit the Israeli entertainment culture." The beloved American pastime (aside from football and baseball) of ogling women in a more open, acceptable format is one that Ahiraz says "Israelis are looking for."

Hooters will open in Tel Aviv this Summer and will not offer a kosher menu. Interpret that as you will.

When the sun goes down on the city, the blades come out.

Rollerblades, that is. Dozens of young Israelis go blading at night. Check it out.